MasterPeace club in Malawi is coordinated under Sustainable Rural Community Development Organisation in Malawi. Our vision is a country, where rural communities are self-sustained, where the population is healthy and fully empowered, and where all people are equal, know their rights and take their own development initiatives and, our vision is to improve the livelihoods of rural communities by generating economic, agricultural, educational and cultural empowerment, and by promoting health and gender equality through the mobilisation, training, education and entertainment of all women, men and children.

  The organization has long worked together with MasterPeace Global as a licensed club in Malawi where we are implementing initiatives which we are aiming at promoting peace in Malawi to subscribe to the global vision of MasterPeace. With this we are implementing sport for peace initiatives which is aiming at filling the gender gap existing in Malawian Society. During this year MasterPeace Malawi partnered with Chikwawa Queens Football Club, our partnership is based on bridging the gender gaps existing in Malawi, by setting a unique dimension between women and men, girls and boys.

All along, Malawian Society believed that Football is the game for men only, however our partnership with Chikwawa Queens football is aiming at turning upside down the thinking of the people in Malawi to prove that there are no differences between males and females when it comes to roles and responsibilities.

Utrecht youth deploy talents for their city without walls

Utrecht’s 900th birthday is festively celebrated. All of us from MasterPeace are also celebrating. MasterPeace was founded and based in Utrecht and we can't pass up the opportunity to honor this beautiful city.

In the period from June 2 to November 11, 2022, we organized creative boot camps for youngsters between 15 and 19 years old, with the theme; “city without walls, full of talent”. The goals of the boot camps were to create perspective for the young people and to stimulate social cohesion and active citizenship.

The youngsters have discovered their talents and immediately put them to use for an even better, more inclusive and sustainable city. The boot camps were held with 145 youngsters from different neighborhoods in Utrecht. We worked with two third-year MAVO classes from Gerrit Rietveld College, VWO5 students from St. Bonifatius College and youngsters from the Leidsche Rijn and Vleuten-de Meern districts at Azotod.

The boot camp program consisted of a graffiti workshop, rap workshop, devising neighborhood actions and advising the mayor. The ideas of Kate Raworth's Donut Economy, where the values; take good care of yourself, take good care of others and take good care of your surroundings, being the central theme of our program.

Walls of Connection - three graffiti murals

When we heard about the theme of the celebration "city without walls", we immediately thought of our "Walls of Connection". A project in which we transform walls, which are intended to separate people from each other, into walls of connection by bringing together different youngsters from the city to visualize their dreams about Utrecht as an inclusive sustainable city. The youngsters had graffiti workshops given by professional graffiti artists in which they made visualizations of Utrecht as a city without walls.

Following the visualizations of the youngsters, the artists started making a design for an actual mural. For example, Robert Brink (De Verfdokter) made a design of the creations of the students of the Gerrit Rietveld College for a mural at ‘Toekomstpunt’ on Voortrekkers Dreef. He also designed a mural for Azotod based on the input of young people from the Leidsche Rijn and Vleuten-de Meern districts. Munir de Vries has made a design based on the visualizations of the students of the St. Bonifatius College. See the results below. At all three locations, the youngsters helped the artists with the actual spraying of the wall.

On Wednesday the 14th of  December we officially opened the 'Wall of Connection' at Muziekpodium Azotod. A great moment to look back on the project together with the youngsters from DURF!, Azotod, the Verfdokter and other partners. 'U in de wijk' were also there to capture the moment. Watch their video here.

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‘City Without Walls’ rap

In addition to the beautiful Walls of Connections, the youngsters from the different neighborhoods have converted their ideas about their city without walls into a rap. They did this during the rap workshop led by rapper Jermain Bridgewater. Each group of youngsters has written a verse of the rap. Jermain started in June at Gerrit Rietveld College, where the students chose the beat of the rap and wrote the first verse together. The students found it very exciting and a bit scary,  but overcame their fear and even recorded their lyrics themselves in the recording studio at BOKS in Overvecht.

In October, the youngsters at Azotod and the students of the St. Bonifatius College wrote the second and third verse. They also went into the studio to record the rap. The rap is not only in Dutch, but also contains lyrics in Ukrainian, specially sung by a Ukrainian refugee.

The youngsters rap about their 'city without a wall, with more than one culture' as a place where everyone is welcome and can feel at home. They also see Utrecht as a city where people are connected; “Old walls, young people. connected in this large village without borders', and where we work together towards a sustainable, beautiful and inclusive future; ‘one for all and all for one in Utrecht, Utrecht has room for everyone, that is Utrecht’. 

Listen here to the rap on soundcloud here.

On Friday 11 November, the celebration of Utrecht 900 Years was festively concluded. The Sint Maarten parade ended in the Moreelsepark, where Jermain was ready to give a spectacular performance. Jermain and I were given the honor of presenting the 'City Without Walls' rap. Dmitri from Ukraine was also on stage to rap his lyrics live for a very large audience. The rap was well received and the audience sang along enthusiastically.

Neighborhood actions and advice for the mayor

Finally, in addition to their creative excesses during the graffiti and rap workshops, the youngsters have also shown that they are active citizens. They came up with cool neighborhood campaigns and, in response to a personal video message from mayor Sharon Dijksma, they gave advice to the mayor. Her question to the youngsters was; how do we turn Utrecht into a “masterpiece”?

After a short introduction to Kate Raworth's Donut Economics and playing our "Boiling Frog Game" that challenges young people to think about topics that affect our sense of freedom, it was time to brainstorm. Ideas for actions soon followed, such as helping out a shelter for Ukrainian refugees, collecting food for the food bank and promoting Keti Koti. These actions were actually carried out by the youngsters as part of their social internship.

In addition, letters were written and video messages were recorded to be sent to the mayor. The recommendations ranged from more free events for young people aged 16 and over to tackle loneliness among youngsters, to making public transport cheaper and introducing higher environmental taxes to combat climate change. To top it all off, a poem was written about how the problem of litter could be solved.

We look back on a successful project. The Utrecht youth can be proud of how they have expressed their visions about their city without walls in various creative ways and have made their voices heard for an even better, more inclusive and more sustainable Utrecht. In other words, Utrecht as a “masterpiece”.

Watch the aftermovie of this project here.

This project has been made possible by:

Project Context

Quite often, both salaries of the employed citizens, as well as the pensions for the retired seniors(where and when existing - are not fully sufficient for the high costs of life in those “older”. More and more seniors and adults (with fewer opportunities), thus, are looking forward to another way of regular money incoming into their households and are positive towards entrepreneurship opportunities, as they see self-employment as a valuable option. Like we see in many of our projects the lack of (jobs) perspective is a root cause for trust gaps between citizens and institutions; and for smaller and bigger unrest in societies.

Seniors and adults with fewer opportunities were the beneficiaries of our activities in Croatia, The Netherlands, Germany, Serbia and Sweden. As MasterPeace we co created in a multicountry, multiculture consortium which brought us various insights on personal dreams and behavior; on local perception on how to spend time in work and private.

The ambition of our consortium was to “equip” seniors and adults with fewer opportunities with set of skills needed to work on personal development in fields of entrepreneurial intelligence and creating (self-) employment opportunities proactively in today’s reality of employment uncertainty and the world of extinction of many known jobs and occupation now and even more in the future. That new needed capacity is entrepreneurial intelligence - competence that can be trained and developed by gaining different skills, knowledge, attitudes through quality adult non-formal education.

Key objectives

• Empower seniors and adults with fewer opportunities in entrepreneurial intelligence and mind-set development (including intrapersonal and interpersonal social-emotional and creativity competences), through development of inspiring, innovative and up-to-date handbook and e-learning courses;

• Empower our adult educators and improve knowledge management of adult education institutions and organisations in theory and practice for building competences of adult educators in entrepreneurial mind-set and creativity in entrepreneurship development of citizens, through training course, innovative Guidebook with curriculum and e-learning course for adult educators’ training;

• Exchange good practices and further develop quality strategic partnership among partners from 5 European countries with different realities in regards to citizens’ self-employment and entrepreneurship.

In the project participated :

- 12 staff / project managers and assistants;

- 18 teachers/trainers/researchers and technicians working on the blended learning 9off and online) manuals;

-30 adult educators tested the outputs with ca 120 citizens (with fewer opportunities) on local level

-200 + participants joint our summits in which we shared and discussed the new materials

The blended learning materials are available on https://masterpeace.org/publications/

●       O1 Handbook on Entrepreneurial learning, Intelligence and mindset development for adults

●       O2 Guidebook with Curriculum: “Empowering adult educators for Entrepreneurial learning, Intelligence and mind-set development among seniors and adults with fewer opportunities”

●       O3 E-learning course for educators: “Entrepreneurial learning, Intelligence and mind-set development education for seniors and adults with fewer opportunities”

●       O4 E-learning course for seniors, adults / beneficiaries: “IntRApersonal aspect of Entrepreneurial mind-set development”

●       O5 E-learning course for seniors, adults / beneficiaries: “Leadership, Teamwork and other intERpersonal skills within Entrepreneurial mind-set development”

Many participants did have the perception that social entrepreneurship was not more than volunteer work that costs you a lot of time that could be spent more productively. Now we finalized the projects participants send us the feedback that they realize that being a social entrepreneur is both challenging as rewarding. The feeling of ownership that also brings funding and social impact scored the highest which encourages all partners to continue to build new innovative materials to engage, connect and empower citizens.

In collaboration with our partners and linked to the International Day of Peace, one of MasterPeace key momentums, we organized our International Multiplier events (E5) spread out over different events in September 2022. We used the concepts and methods of non-formal education, and shared our intellectual outputs https://masterpeace.org/publications/ .

The events had multiple goals:

- To present the project outcomes and promote the support for entrepreneurship education of seniors and adults with fewer opportunities in Netherlands (and Europe);

- To encourage and educate present adult educators on using the intellectual outputs of the project in their future entrepreneurship education work for entrepreneurship start-up among seniors and adults with fewer opportunities, their beneficiaries.

During this conferences, we had the chance to build local/national level partnerships with other present stakeholders, to ensure continuous promotion of our adult education work endeavors for quality entrepreneurship education of seniors and adults with fewer opportunities in our communities. It also supports to gain recognition for the efforts in promoting entrepreneurship among seniors and adults with fewer opportunities, and thus contributing to the general social recognition of adult education work.

The 9^th of September MasterPeace The Netherlands organized as a network event in co creation with the Protestantse Kerken Nederland (PKN) a conference and skyconcert: 50+ representatives of 20+ organizations (who all have a social impact related mission) joined and celebrated the International Day of Peace. https://masterpeace.org/skyconcerts/ using music to create a message of hope, unity and togetherness. To voice our message for global, local and inner peace.

The Peace is MasterPeace is not only the absence of war, but the presence of freedom of expression, democratic values, access to education, access to perspective.

This is in line with our Theory of Change; to engage, connect and empower; aligned with the EU Youth Strategy 2021-2027.

MasterPeace took the lead in organizing the Skyconcert to inspire all participants. In the talks we explained our ideas on what challenges people have , o.a. the adults and the materials that we developed (and free of charge available). This resulted in 5 follow up talks on how to co create. A unique event in which we combined music and entrepreneurship.

On the 21^st of September MasterPeace organized a conference and Skyconcert in co creation with the Ukrainian Foundation Vitalnya (Ukrainian for “Home”)- Utrecht. More than 50 Ukrainian participants joined the conference and Skyconcert. Impressive songs and talks about people losing lives, houses destroyed and economically broke. We agreed to partner via arts for healing and support for jobs.  Our learnings and outputs were shared; Social entrepreneurial ideas were generated, some already started. MasterPeace will continue to facilitate the best we can on the broader perspective from healing to jobs- perspective.